


Twenty-Four Hours a Day

by Nidor_and_Petrichor



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Gen, M/M, Numbers Station, This is seriously my nightmare fuel, Time has no meaning in Night Vale, WZZZ
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-28
Updated: 2014-02-28
Packaged: 2018-01-14 02:04:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1248640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nidor_and_Petrichor/pseuds/Nidor_and_Petrichor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One of Carlos' scientists makes a discovery about the local numbers station.</p><p>Written several months before "Numbers"; set during "Yellow Helicopters".</p><p>Update: This is officially now contradicted by things mentioned in "Numbers", but it's okay, because that episode was perfect in every way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Twenty-Four Hours a Day

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in October, pre-episode 42 ("Numbers"). I think it was going to be a part of something else and I couldn't figure out how to work it in, so it sat around on my harddrive for a while.
> 
> It seems pertinent to post it now, because tomorrow's new episode is about WZZZ and I can not articulate how excited I am about that fact.

_Did you know that it broadcasts a monotone female voice reading out seemingly random numbers interspersed with chimes twenty four hours a day, seven days a week? ...To be honest, here at Night Vale Radio we don’t know exactly what that station is for, or what master it is serving._

\---

Ever since giving his watch away, Carlos has been forced to rely on the assumption that certain things will occur, or not, at certain times and those must be the times these things were meant to occur—or not. He should, he has decided, simply react accordingly, instead of thinking about the matter of punctuality as an absolute.

It had become something of a routine to begin wrapping up work while he listened to the evening community radio broadcast. The beginning of the weather segment was now as good an indicator as any that it was time to shut down his computer, hang up his lab coat and start heading home for the evening. Or, as was happening more and more frequently these days, to Cecil’s apartment.

As soft Spanish singing wafted from the portable radio on his desk, he wrote out a short to-do list for tomorrow morning, tapped his stacks of paper into a tidy order and, with a back-crackling stretch, stood up in preparation to leave.

He was distracted mid-yawn by the sound of a chair clattering to the ground. It took him a moment, as well as a glance towards his feet, to realize it wasn’t his own.

“Shit!”

There was a series of thumps and low curses from behind one of the portable partition walls that afforded his research team a semblance of privacy in their small open-plan office.

“Katherine?” he called out, warily. He was fairly certain the others had already trickled out, waving their goodbyes as they’d gone. “Kate, is that you? Everything okay?”

A wide-eyed face popped around the edge of the partition. It was topped with an uncontrolled mass of dark, springy hair and a pair of massive, green headphones, cord stretched tightly and still tethering the wearer to her computer.

“Are you leaving? Wait—Wait, hold on a second—” she fumbled, voice too loud in an attempt to be made audible over a sound only she was hearing.

There was another series of muffled expletives from behind the wall. A moment later Katherine Montblanc, respected physicist and mathematician, stumbled out clutching a thick folder, looking somewhat unsettlingly like the transient woman who lived in the Earth Sciences building in town. She bee-lined towards the break table in the center of the room, urgently waving at Carlos to join her.

With a sweep of her arm she pushed aside the contents of the table, condensing the empty mugs and takeout containers to one side so that she could arrange her papers: pages and pages of numbers, rows and columns and charts, some of them with careful boxes drawn around significant data clusters, others with haphazard cells highlighted in a rainbow of colors.

“Kate, I’m trying very hard to get out of here at a reasonable hour tonight. Can you make this quick?” Carlos asked, adjusting the strap on his bag.

“Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay! So, you know how while you’ve been obsessing over the news radio channel I’ve been keeping an ear out for WZZZ, the numbers station?” Carlos thinks that is perhaps a somewhat unfair assessment of his (admittedly vested) personal interest in community programming, but motions her to continue anyway.

“Mostly for fun, you know? Because there are a number of things about it that are unusual,” she ticks them off on her fingers as she goes. “It’s broadcasting on FM frequency, for one. It has a registered call sign, and makes regular, legally mandated breaks for station identification. There’s no secrecy about who funds it — I mean, it’s practically the only line item that’s _not_ redacted in the municipal budget, for crying out loud!”

She raises another finger, as if to add another point, but instead gestures wordlessly for a moment before gripping her hair in an apparent attempt to re-marshal her thoughts. After a moment she drops her arms and continues.

“Okay, so, weird, even for what it is, great, fine. But! There are also things about it that are fairly typical, right? Female voice reading strings of numbers, indecipherable messages, predictable timetable. More predictable than the sunrise and sunset, in point of fact. It is the only part of Night Vale, as far as I can tell, that operates on what we would consider ‘correct’ time.

“There are signals. Here, this—” She jabs at a one of her papers, to a cluster of numbers surrounded by a red box and accompanied by a formulaic notation. “There’s a distinct series of numbers that correspond to the, the ‘real’ time, and when it’s off, when Night Vale isn’t running on normal schedule, it seems to be modified by the following series of numbers, these ones, here, in blue. Whoever is running this station is aware of the time discrepancy. They know about it and seem to be communicating it to whoever is listening.”

“Kate,” Carlos sighs and scrubs at his face in frustration. He starts again, “Kate, this means somebody out there knows more than we do about how time works here. Why didn’t this come up before?”

“Because other things kept coming up! Things way more scary and life-threatening than not knowing what time it is—which should really not be scary at all, but is really, truly, deeply unsettling—things like a miniature city waging war on us, or shadow zombies taking over or—”

Carlos sighs again, and turns the papers toward himself, pulling out his reading glasses to better examine the small print.

“—Alright, I understand,” he tries to keep his voice soothing, tries to channel Cecil’s radio voice, since Kate’s is beginning to race and squeak and he can already feel the pressure building behind his eyes. “That’s a fair point. So: what happened?”

Kate began to pace rapidly between her workstation and the break table, turning sharply at every eighth step. “It changed. It changed routine. It’s different. It’s never been _different_ before.”

Her anxiety is starting to give him flashbacks to years spent as a TA. He had no interest in wasting time playing twenty questions just to get her to arrive at the answer, but it seems that may be the only way to focus her ranting. Changes in numbers station radio programming held very little interest for him right now, between the recent spate of sunless days and the promises about not overworking that he’s been trying very hard to keep, but he doesn’t think she’s going to leave him alone until she gets this all off her chest.

“Different how?” he asks, and, yes, that’s definitely a headache brewing in there; there go some of his more enjoyable plans for the evening.

“I have the station constantly monitored. The computer transcribes the broadcast and matches it to known patterns. Although they’re not always in the same order, after more than a year of analysis, it nearly _always_ finds a match to previous recordings. A few minutes ago it went completely haywire; completely unknown strings, new patterns, and they’re now on repeat. There was an emergency broadcast tone where the 21:47 station identification bumper should be. That’s _never happened before_.”

Kate stops her frantic pacing and arm waving to look Carlos straight in the eye and says, “It feels wrong, Carlos. Very, _very_ wrong. ”

They are both silent and still, the only sounds the soft clicking of Kate clenching and unclenching her jaw and fists, and the radio still playing from Carlos’ desk. The weather has ended and Cecil’s voice is washing them in a comforting baritone, wrapping up the final segment, a signal that it is time to stop working, time to leave for the night, time for things to come to an end.

Carlos shrugs on a thick flannel against the cold desert night that is waiting for him outside.

“— _they will be but unacquainted pedestrians. But, before they left, the witness said that some low flying yellow helicopt—_ ”

He twists the radio volume all the way off and smiles at her reassuringly.

“This is Night Vale,” he says, giving her a pat on the shoulder as he passes on his way to the door. “Of course it’s very, very wrong.”

 


End file.
